This article suggests that consumers have fairly stable brand loyalties, but that their purchasing behaviour can appear random as various serendipitous factors influence it. View Summary

This article suggests that consumers have fairly stable brand loyalties, but that their purchasing behaviour can appear random as various serendipitous factors influence it. This means that analysis of data over a short period of time can be misleading, and make the classification of heavy and light users difficult. Even tracking purchasing behaviour over a year can be misleading as many consumers purchase in a given category infrequently, allowing one missed or additional purchase to change their classification. Serendipitous factors will continue to make it difficult for marketers to target individuals, even with the development of Big Data.

Defining and improving customer experience is a growing priority for market research because experience is replacing quality as the competitive battleground for marketing. View Summary

Defining and improving customer experience is a growing priority for market research because experience is replacing quality as the competitive battleground for marketing. Service quality is an outgrowth of the total quality management (TQM) movement of the 1980s and suffers from that movement’s focus on the provider rather than the value derived by customers. Researchers today state that customer experience is generated through a longer process of company–customer interaction across multiple channels, generated through both functional and emotional clues. Our research with practitioners indicates that most firms use customer satisfaction, or its derivative the Net Promoter Score, to assess their customers’ experiences. We question this practice based on the conceptual gap between these measures and the customer experience. In IJMR 53, 6 (2011), we introduce a new measure appropriate for the modern conceptualisation of customer experience: the customer experience quality (EXQ) scale. In this article we extend that work and compare EXQ’s predictive power with that of customer satisfaction. We establish that EXQ better explains and predicts both, loyalty and recommendations, than customer satisfaction.

3

Are you getting personal? Then keep your distance

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Jeremy Bullmore, Market Leader, Quarter 2, 2013, pp. 22-22

In this opinion piece, Jeremy Bullmore warns that brands that try to be your best friend need to realise that relationships are a two-way process. View Summary

In this opinion piece, Jeremy Bullmore warns that brands that try to be your best friend need to realise that relationships are a two-way process. Bullmore cautions that in attempts at personalisation, brands can become too pushy with their efforts seen by consumers as ingratiation. Instead of trying to dupe consumers into a sense of familiarity by clumsily wielding data, a canny brand builder leaves room for each member of the audience to respond to brand clues and to contribute as much to the relationship as the brand itself.

This paper asserts that brand building is now about experiences, and that these experiences are the sum of thousands of touchpoints. View Summary

This paper asserts that brand building is now about experiences, and that these experiences are the sum of thousands of touchpoints. If a customer's feeling about a brand is built through touchpoints, then traditional ways of measuring the brand's impact, such as purchase-drivers, may no longer be sufficient. The authors present a new quantitative research instrument that models a brand marketplace and reveals the stages and touchpoints on the customer journey that have the most impact on preference for a brand and its competitive set. Moving beyond assessing the typical touchpoints included in media-centric measurement models, the tool measures all points of interaction whether intentional or unintentional, paid or earned, physical, sonic, or olfactory.

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How StarHub is using 'big data' to transform its business

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Low Lai Chow, Event Reports, Loyalty World Asia, December 2012

Singapore-based telecommunications operator StarHub has access to reams of consumer data and has for some time been developing ways to mine that for new insights. View Summary

Singapore-based telecommunications operator StarHub has access to reams of consumer data and has for some time been developing ways to mine that for new insights. Seven years ago, the company integrated its three CRM and billing systems into one, just so it could make sense of its customer data. And in late 2012 it launched SmartHub, with subsets of anoymised real-time data across all four platforms operated by StarHub. It has also started partnering research institutions, start-ups, local and international companies in order to develop new analytics and display tools, train data scientists and develop cases and business models.

How a company handles privacy is becoming increasingly important to its wider reputation. This Future Perspectives report from The Futures Company explores how ideas of privacy have changed in different parts of the world and the influence of new technologies on its evolution. View Summary

How a company handles privacy is becoming increasingly important to its wider reputation. This Future Perspectives report from The Futures Company explores how ideas of privacy have changed in different parts of the world and the influence of new technologies on its evolution. Also examined is what the next era of privacy might look like in a world of increasingly smart devices and ever-more expansive forms of data collection. How the public reacts to privacy issues is highly nuanced and dependent on context. Examples of high profile privacy controversies are highlighted to show how different uses of people's data can harm reputations. Recommendations for action include remembering that personal data as "bits of people", recognise context and be among the first companies to be transparent.

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Customer relationship management

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Professor Hugh Wilson, Warc Best Practice, May 2012, pp. 46-47

CRM matters more in some organisations than in others. The industries where it is most dominant are: financial services, utilities, retail and travel and leisure. View Summary

CRM matters more in some organisations than in others. The industries where it is most dominant are: financial services, utilities, retail and travel and leisure. This article outlines ten things that need to be tackled, which include integration with data, process, communications, structure and metrics and improving conversation quality with individualisation, customer centricity, dynamic interaction, customer selectivity and peer-to-peer facilitation.

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Next please - online game for bank tellers: Educate your business partner's sales force through the interactive online game

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Jan Lajka, ESOMAR, CEE Research Forum, Krakow, March 2012

Using the example of a research project for the CSOB, a leading Czech bank, this presentation demonstrates how a research assignment can be turned into a highly useful, multi-purpose tool benefiting both the client and the bank's customer. View Summary

Using the example of a research project for the CSOB, a leading Czech bank, this presentation demonstrates how a research assignment can be turned into a highly useful, multi-purpose tool benefiting both the client and the bank's customer.

Results delivered by conjoint analysis on the bank's personal banking product portfolio were used to develop an educative online game that simulates a sales communication of bank representatives with their customers.

As an innovative concept for training the sales force, the game was eventually merged into CSOB's internal education system.

We propose a model that allows analysts to capture and quantify realistic non-linear, non-compensatory effects in customer satisfaction modelling. For too long, academic and applied marketing researchers have relied upon restrictive linear, compensatory statistical models to inform their understanding of how performance on product and service attributes impacts overall satisfaction, loyalty, etc. An extended case study and a summary of 22 further empirical studies illustrate the utility and robustness of the proposed Make or Break model of customer satisfaction.

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Using supermarket loyalty card data to analyse the impact of promotions

The aim of this paper is to show how supermarket loyalty card data from a panel of over 1.4 million shoppers can be used to analyse the effect of price promotions in a way which can bring significant advantages to retailers and manufacturers when making promotional decisions. View Summary

The aim of this paper is to show how supermarket loyalty card data from a panel of over 1.4 million shoppers can be used to analyse the effect of price promotions in a way which can bring significant advantages to retailers and manufacturers when making promotional decisions. The paper demonstrates the significant advantages that loyalty card data can bring to enhance our understanding of promotions, compared to traditional scanner and panel datasets. Regression analysis is used to compare the effects of different promotional mechanics upon different tiers of product across the fresh beef category in Tesco, using both scanner data and loyalty card data. The results show that using loyalty card data, which enables us to moderate for specific shopper characteristics, produces more statistically significant results and provides a more detailed picture of how promotions influence sales.

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Customer data: Danger in data

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Richard Higginbotham, Admap, March 2012, pp. 40-41

A study shows that people generally trust companies to use any personal data they give them positively. View Summary

A study shows that people generally trust companies to use any personal data they give them positively.

Companies that use that data to tailor their messages and deliver welcome benefits to their customers will find that these consumers become confident about revealing even more information about themselves.

As long as their communications are being properly addressed and relevant, they assume that a company is protecting their data and making sound use of it.

This confidence can disappear in an instant if they start to receive badly targeted messages or mishandling of their data results in fraud and can lead to mistrust of the brand.

12

Real-time planning: Track the data on the dashboard

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Neil Charles, Admap, January 2012, pp. 36-38

Real-time planning is a tactical rather than strategic tool that, through the analysis of customer behavioural data, enables the short-term refinement of communications strategy. View Summary

Real-time planning is a tactical rather than strategic tool that, through the analysis of customer behavioural data, enables the short-term refinement of communications strategy. But with all the data now on offer, it is nearly impossible for a brand to put across a consistent message. So rather than tracking large volumes of data and hoping to generate insights from them that can lead to more efficient marketing, the chosen data should flow from analysis work that has already been done.

13

Optimizing Market Segmentation for a Global Mobile Phone Provider for both Targeting and Insight

This paper describes a complex 5-country segmentation of the mobile telephony market on behalf of MTS, a leading global mobile phone provider. View Summary

This paper describes a complex 5-country segmentation of the mobile telephony market on behalf of MTS, a leading global mobile phone provider. MTS wanted the segmentation to maintain a common framework across all countries, while capturing any real differences between them. A critical requirement was “targetability”—the ability to accurately attribute a segment to each one of MTS’s subscribers. This entailed that the segments be well differentiated on “hard” behavioral metrics from MTS’s billing databases. However, it was also critical that such differentiation was not achieved at the expense of richness on “softer” aspects of marketing—segments also needed to have distinct needs, attitudes and motivations, so that they could be used as a platform for messaging, product development, and advertising. Meeting these competing requirements led to a solution that combined survey data on more than 10,000 respondents and billing data on more than 80 million customers using an innovative analytic technique.

This paper is based on the book, "Beyond the Familiar: Long-Term Growth through Customer Focus and Innovation". View Summary

This paper is based on the book, "Beyond the Familiar: Long-Term Growth through Customer Focus and Innovation". It focuses on what managers need to do to ensure that valid, actionable customer insights from a wide range of sources reach those with the power to act and that they then do so. Growth is seen as a consequence of promising and consistently delivering better and better solutions to customers. Further, this process is seen as building a valuable long-term asset, brand equity, which then promotes further growth. The authors also set out to build a framework to help executives master this challenge that will lead to consistently improved customer experiences.

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Collecting research data from within social media sites: What works and what does not

An outline of various best practices in social media research. The authors discuss how Moskowitz Jacobs, Inc., with the help of Peanut Labs, developed a sales enhancement tool to: (1) identify prospects' likelihood to purchase an automobile and (2) identify messaging preferences, based on the data collected from a social media sample. View Summary

An outline of various best practices in social media research. The authors discuss how Moskowitz Jacobs, Inc., with the help of Peanut Labs, developed a sales enhancement tool to: (1) identify prospects' likelihood to purchase an automobile and (2) identify messaging preferences, based on the data collected from a social media sample. The paper begins with an overview of Peanut Labs' methodology and how it has allowed companies like Moskowitz Jacobs, Inc. to gain access to targeted audiences who share specific interests, attitudes, beliefs and values regarding a particular activity. Subsequently, the data from this research is shared to demonstrate how Moskowitz Jacobs, Inc. was able to obtain a representative ethnic mix of sample as well as get the results they needed in a very timely fashion. The paper concludes with a summary of results from this study.

Media planning and measurement appear to still follow planning and purchasing rules developed 50 years ago, with resources allocated on the basis of past media usage, so the authors describe how a new media planning and allocation model might work for retail organisations. View Summary

Media planning and measurement appear to still follow planning and purchasing rules developed 50 years ago, with resources allocated on the basis of past media usage, so the authors describe how a new media planning and allocation model might work for retail organisations. They utilise the recorded media habits of the customers of three leading US fastfood chains to illustrate mis-allocation of resources before constructing a CHAID (Chi-Square Automatic Interaction Detection) model of predictive media usage and suggesting how these predictive models might be used to improve media planning.

As a data analysis technology, data mining has matured to the extent that there are now a number of sophisticated commercial software packages available. View Summary

As a data analysis technology, data mining has matured to the extent that there are now a number of sophisticated commercial software packages available. The purpose of this article is to explore what data mining has become, its relationship to statistics and its relevance in market research.

Reporting from ad:Tech Chicago 2009, Geoffrey Precourt, WARC's U.S. editor, covers a session on 360-degree marketing by Elva Lewis, Procter & Gamble's associate director of corporate marketing. Lewis argues that P&G is "one of the biggest and most siloed companies in the world", presenting unique challenges when it comes to understanding its customers. Currently, the FMCG giant's communications target around half of the potential U.S. audience base of 200 million people. The company's former marketing director, Jim Stengel, emphasised the importance of understanding the "who", the "what" and the "how" of the purchase process, but, until now, only the first of these criteria had been truly met, she added. However, by aggregating this information, and taking advantage of the scale of its operations, in a single-source database, P&G will now "be able to understand, for the first time, the individual. We'll know who she is. We'll know what she cares about at P&G."

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Personalisation, relevance and consistency in database marketing

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Yolanda Noble, Admap, September 2008, Issue 497, pp. 38-40

Technology has enabled marketers to personalise communications to customers, affordably and regularly, at every value level. View Summary

Technology has enabled marketers to personalise communications to customers, affordably and regularly, at every value level. The improved database marketing capability that has resulted from technological development is also becoming increasingly crucial for financial and other companies as regulatory barriers disappear; it becomes of key importance to attract and keep the right customers with the right offers, so that they remain profitable. Profitability per customer must be understood at the individual level, or brands will not know who to target, why and with what. Therefore, metrics which measure the outcomes and cost efficiencies of targeted communications are critical. They are also vital for evaluating and understanding the value of existing company databases during diligence enquiries before and after mergers and acquisitions.

20

How long is a lifetime?

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Peter Rosenwald, Admap, October 2007, Issue 487, pp. 54-56

Loyalty marketing and CRM recognise that getting and keeping customers is vital to the success of a brand, and that calculating a customer's lifetime value vital to determining strategy. View Summary

Loyalty marketing and CRM recognise that getting and keeping customers is vital to the success of a brand, and that calculating a customer's lifetime value vital to determining strategy. The problem is that the higher the front-end incentive, the lower the likely lifetime value, and that all lives end sometime. The best way to counter this is to understand the economic effects of churn, develop an attrition spreadsheet and calculate CRM budgets.

21

How to be a customer champion: turning insight into action

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Martin Hayward, Market Leader, Issue 34, Autumn 2006, pp. 30-31

This paper argues that the speed with which consumer insights and information can now be fed back to managements are now much faster than they used to be, even on a daily basis, but that this has not been matched by the ability of managements to take advantage of this feedback and respond. View Summary

This paper argues that the speed with which consumer insights and information can now be fed back to managements are now much faster than they used to be, even on a daily basis, but that this has not been matched by the ability of managements to take advantage of this feedback and respond. Rather, planning organisation, practices and systems remain agonisingly slow. Winning companies in the future will be those that learn how to respond rapidly to continuous fast consumer data, including a much greater willingness to experiment. How this will be possible with the new database analyses offered by firms like dunnhumby is indicated.

22

Interactive IMC: The Relational-Transactional Continuum and the Synergistic Use of Customer Data

In a business-to-business context in the auto insurance industry, the synergistic value of the continuum of relational-transactional data in developing interactive Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) relationships was assessed. View Summary

In a business-to-business context in the auto insurance industry, the synergistic value of the continuum of relational-transactional data in developing interactive Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) relationships was assessed. While all types of data were found to be important, relationship-oriented factors contributed more to perceived quality of the relationship than did mixed or transaction variables. The study also investigated the ability to segment business customers employing a combination using the relational, mixed, and transactional data. The customer segments differed in their evaluations of the firm’s performance on the various relational, mixed, and transactional factors, but not on their overall evaluation of the relationship. This finding provides support for the notion that different customer segments are interested in different types of relationships. In addition, the segments were significantly different in terms of the amount of insurance written with the company, underscoring the financial importance of segmenting customers on these variables.

Professor Merlin Stone and Neil Woodcock, of WCL (a change management and CRM consultancy), discuss a new model of customer management (CMAT) and good practice in customer acquisition, penetration and retention. View Summary

Professor Merlin Stone and Neil Woodcock, of WCL (a change management and CRM consultancy), discuss a new model of customer management (CMAT) and good practice in customer acquisition, penetration and retention. Using examples and findings from original research, they show that a sound approach to CM can result in considerable profit improvement on any of a number of measures.

24

Attractive models

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Andrew Greenyer, Admap, June 2005, Issue 462, pp. 32-34

In this article Andrew Greenyer, director of customer relationship solutions at Group 1 Software, reviews the role of data in business, examines how data availability is becoming more limited, and des... View Summary

In this article Andrew Greenyer, director of customer relationship solutions at Group 1 Software, reviews the role of data in business, examines how data availability is becoming more limited, and describes the circumstances in which modelled information has, once again, become critical to CRM success, customer development and new customer acquisition.

25

'Dirty data' and customer feedback applications

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Jeffrey W. Manning, Market Research Society, Annual Conference, 2003

This is a practical paper which presents a model for better use of existing customer feedback data, or 'dirty data', within organizations, rather than sole reliance external research and purchased modeled data. View Summary

This is a practical paper which presents a model for better use of existing customer feedback data, or 'dirty data', within organizations, rather than sole reliance external research and purchased modeled data. The application of these principles will allow companies to streamline external expenditure on research and data while redirecting those funds towards processes that allow for continuous refreshment of customer information to drive insights and build proprietary assets. In this way, this paper looks more at the macro level application of research procedures than it does at specific techniques. The transition from use of traditional 'clean' purchased data to the application of customer-generated 'dirty' data requires new levels of creativity among analysts, market researchers and campaign planners. The structured application of customer feedback processes promises to build shareholder value as proprietary database assets are developed.